The Mighty Red

By Louise Erdrich

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK - LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION - A FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

"A sweeping, tender-hearted epic."--Harper's Bazaar

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.

History is a flood. The mighty red . . .

In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.

Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He's determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter's and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0063277077
• ISBN13: 9780063277076
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 384 Pages

Customer Reviews

Interesting & Descriptive!

Few chapters in, “this is an interesting book” came out of my mouth. I adore the chapter titles, the ease of chapter length, the telling of this story from the different points of view. I may be late to the review party on this one - but if this can give it an even greater boost, my job is done! Read this, seriously, go obtain this book in whatever fashion. You’ll appreciate the small town characters, the love triangle, the drama, the descriptive details of the houses and the town, the edge you sit on waiting to find out what all of this is pointing towards. Giving you more, little by little, but you realize you still aren’t sure where this is going. This is one of those books that will tempt you to keep reading past your bedtime or a bit over your lunch break time (not speaking from experience at all)! Very very very good!